


Quarantine

by Patomac



Series: Writer's Month 2020 [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Chronic Illness, Gen, Imprisonment, Quarantine, Seizures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-03
Updated: 2020-08-03
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:46:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25680787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Patomac/pseuds/Patomac
Summary: Callie's mother is sick, and no one seems to care why.
Series: Writer's Month 2020 [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1862173
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3
Collections: Writer's Month 2020





	Quarantine

**Author's Note:**

> For Writer's Month 2020 Day 2: Quarantine

The first time my mother got sick, she passed out cold in the midst of the rations line. One moment she was joking with Teriq Gamalon, the next she was on the floor, seizing.

Teriq screamed, but not half as loud as I did. I was on my feet in a second, charging across the lunchroom towards her, but Raella Marinan, our cook, held me back. With her fairy princess blonde hair and petite build, she’d always looked fragile to me. Breakable in a way that most deep space mariners were not. That day, though, her arms felt as if they were made of concrete.

“Easy,” she’d told me. “She’ll be fine.”

I watched my mother’s head bounce on the metal bulkhead for an interminable three minutes. Her eyes were wide and sightless. Her hands convulsed on empty air. The crew cleared the chairs out from around her. Someone put a shirt beneath her head.

When she finally stopped, an unnatural hush fell over the mess. Raella released me, and I ran forward, crashing to the ground at my mother’s side.

I grasped her hand in mine. “Mom?” I asked. “Mom, are you okay?”

She panted as if she’d just run from life support to the engines. Blood trickled from her open lips.

She smiled anyway. “Fine, baby. Just fine.”

They put us off on the first outpost we passed. It wasn’t the black—not exactly—but the Carillon system wasn’t known for its wealth of resources.

The security services held us in quarantine for a solid month following disembarkation. My mother and I were given a single cell with two metal beds. There was a toilet and a dry wash station. There were no vids and no tabs. Not even a window to hint at the passage of time.

Three times a day, printed rations were slid through a door on a metal tray. Twice a week, the doctor would visit. He was a tall, dark-skinned man in a dingy grey coat. Once, I guessed, it had been white. He peered at us over the edge of his clipboard, made a few notes, and then went on his way.

(I gave up on begging him for answers after his third visit; all of my pleading fell on utterly oblivious ears.)

Fear of contagion is a powerful thing. I’d heard the stories as long as I’d lived—outposts laid low by a bacteria. Native flora on planets being stripped by the plague. The whole of Rahimiri’s sentient race—the only one humanity had ever encountered—had been killed off by a single human enzyme.

I understood the fear. I saw it in my mother’s sallow face. I felt it in the very depths of my bones.

She seized twice more while we were in quarantine. The first time, only a week into our stay, I’d been terrified. I banged against the door, shouting for help until my throat was raw. Afterwards, when my mother was well again, she’d ripped a strip from her sheets to bandage my bloody hands.

She wound the cloth around my wrists with the same care she used to repair a leaking FTL engine. “If you get the chance to get out of here, you need to go,” she said.

My chin wobbled. I felt tears leaking from my eyes, and with my hands in my mother’s grip, I couldn’t wipe them away.

“And leave you?”

“We don’t know what I have. If you stay here, you could get it too.”

“If it were contagious, I would have caught it already.”

“You don’t know that,” my mother said. “It could have a long incubation period. Weeks. Maybe months.”

“If you caught it anywhere it was on Andosyne,” I said. It had been our only stop in the three months before my mother’s first seizure. “Your symptoms showed in less than two weeks.”

My mother finished my bandages, but she didn’t release my hand. She gripped me tighter—so tight that it almost hurt.

“Listen to me, Callie Starwind,” she said, looking me straight in the eye. “You are my daughter. I didn’t raise you to give up on some backwater outpost in the Serran system. You’re going to get out of here, and you’re going to live a wonderful life. With or without me. Is that understood?”

I ground my teeth together. “I’m leaving with you, or not at all.”

The outpost released us three weeks later. As a parting gift, they gave my mother a diagnosis—solar radiation poisoning, cause unspecified. They also gave us a bill for 20,000 credits.

A piece.

My mother emptied her savings to give them a down payment. Then, she bartered her way onto a passing trade ship, and both of us ran.

To this day, I can’t set foot on a ship passing through the Carillon system. Every bounty hunter in thirty light years already knows my name. 


End file.
